eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

January 2016

01/31/2016

Academic Advising Approaches: Strategies that Teach Students to Make the Most ofCollege edited by Jane Drake, Peggy Jordan, and Marsha Miller sets out to assemble an anthology of various approaches to the work of college advising. The title captures the point, if not poetically, then clearly. The book attempts to organize a rather chaotic assortment of perspectives. The table of contents contains parts and chapters but the subject matter never really fits into the scaffolding provided there. One finds a variety of approaches with different labels that can often be saying the same thing. The logical structure of the three main divisions of the book does not easily appear in the various chapters themselves. The Venn diagram that one might wish to construct to demarcate the lines between approaches and strategies and schools and perspectives is loaded with overlapping real estate. I found myself wondering at times if the content of one chapter could be exchanged with the content of another without disrupting the flow at all. Is there really a difference between Socratic Advising (Ch. 12) and Advising Informed by Self-Authorship Theory? (Ch. 8) Between Advising as Teaching (Ch. 2) and Learning Centered Advising? (Ch. 3)

What follows is not so much a summary of the book as an attempt on my part to pursue its objectives using my own structure. Here are the ideas for my own advising work (still in its infancy) that I took from my reading.

First, I should make a confession. When I first considered taking on the job of advising students, I found myself wondering if it was one of those jobs, like the job of being a bank teller or the job of checking out groceries, that is, over time, likely to become automated. Indeed, in the final chapter of the book, Marc Lowenstein envisions a possible future where all academic advising is done by a computer program by the name of “Ad-Vy-Zor” who provides an algorithm-driven response to students about what classes they should take. Countering that utopian/dystopian vision, Lowenstein provides a vision of a possible future where advisers have the status of faculty, and students receive academic credit for the serious and rigorous educational work that they do with their advisers.

I think it may help to clarify that academic advising is simply a profession where certain people get paid to do what everyone does – influence others. They are like time brokers that help you to invest learning time wisely. It just so happens that the space and time at which the advising interactions happen is a significant one in most people’s lives. Students’ decisions about education will invariably determine much about their lives – the influence is likely, to “make all the difference” as Robert Frost puts it in “Road Not Travelled.” An academic adviser’s influence can potentially have life altering implications for a student’s financial, social, marital, parental, spiritual, and political life. The advice they give or the insights they solicit may not have as much immediate influence as a hairdresser’s or a car salesman’s but over the long haul of life, that influence can have cascading happiness or misery impacts right to the end.

Perhaps the best way for me to create a construct for the information in this book is to suggest that what advisers do when they chose “an approach” is to select a “role” that they will play in each life that walks through the door and says “I need to register for classes” – the transaction that forces the meeting in the first place. The student may be seeing the exchange as purely commercial or transactional. The “adviser” is merely an “associate” behind the educational version of a Home Depot checkout counter - there simply to facilitate the process of getting and purchasing the “right” paint for a shed. Perhaps it is entirely appropriate to allow the students’ paradigm for the relationship to hold sway. Indeed, it is the paradigm that will turn out to be the least time consuming for both. But shouldn’t the student know that there are a number of possibilities for this relationship? Shouldn’t the student be aware that they are selecting “store clerk” from a menu of relational options that might include a much more intimate and transformational alternative? And what are those options?

First, there is the role of “teacher.” Academic Advising Approaches begins with this possibility in chapter one and concludes in the final chapter by asserting that advising sessions should receive college credit and advisers should be regarded as on par with professors in their status. If students are to make good decisions, they need to know more than they already know about many things and few are in as privileged a position as academic advisers to know more about more things that will be impacting students in a college environment. Advisers can teach students about program requirements, about faculty idiosyncrasies, about support services, about curricular changes and anomalies of yearly course scheduling. If they have worked in their positions for years, they will have seen a variety of students crash, burn, regroup, and succeed. They will have experiential knowledge that can help students pre-emptively before disaster hits. Advisers may wind up teaching all sorts of things they never studied – how to use a Learning Management System – how to write a SAP appeal – how to resolve a conflict over a syllabus requirement, how to save money and time with Assessment of Prior Learning options, how to benefit from e-tutoring or the Learning Center, etc.

A second role that the text explicitly identifies is the role of the coach. Needless to say, coaches often teach but they do more. They also motivate. They look down the road to future challenges and they build the skills to face them. They sometimes make decisions for their “players” but more often than not, they simply give their players choices to pick from when the need to make a decision arises. They provide “scouting reports” on particular classes or faculty members. They evaluate abilities and disabilities and try to get people into positions that accentuate their strengths while identifying potentially game changing weaknesses to account for. They may, at times, inject themselves into the game, arguing that certain rules be applied or not applied in specific cases. Sometimes, they are the ones that keep their eye on the clock and remind the players of “deadlines” and “restrictions.” At times, the coach is the person that picks a player up after a failure and infuses confidence back into them. They may be the ones that see a need for a “time out” to think twice about crucial plays. At other times, they are the person that diffuses enthusiasm when it borders on the naïve. The role of “coach” is diffused throughout a number of different “approaches” that are not explicitly given the name in the chapter title.

A third and fourth approach that can be distilled from the various chapters, though not made quite as explicit as the above two, is the adviser as philosopher or therapist. One chapter discusses “Socratic Advising” and another addresses “The Application of Constructivism and Systems Theory to Academic Advising.” The latter chapter makes reference to Piaget, Vgotsky, John Dewey, and Jerome Bruner among other philosophical minds. Chapter Eight is entitled “Academic Advising Informed by Self-Authorship Theory” and approaches the work of advising in much the way that a philosopher (or therapist) might. In these approaches, the adviser seeks to help students to clarify their values, their fundamental assumptions, the cognitive and emotional causes of their decisions. The ultimate goal is to help the student become an autonomous person rather than merely an expression of the major influences in their life (parents who want them to be engineers not poets or nurses not novelists). The adviser plays a principle role in getting student to think about what they are doing and why they are doing it rather than simply following orders and doing what they are told. “The developmental academic advisor,” the authors explain, “must be knowledgeable (to accommodate the informational role); compassionate, caring, concerned, and friendly (to exude the relational role); and skilled (to enable the conceptual role). The later aspect is perhaps the most frequently underused.”

Here are a few of the thoughts about how advisers can serve students in ways that go beyond simply plugging them into required courses in appropriate semesters.

“[Students] may think that they should accumulate course credits rather than build real world skills and capabilities. Despite their helpfulness, degree audit and evaluations can foster these misconceptions. Because advisers have continuing contact with students, they may be more able to help students see the logic of the curriculum than faculty members who may teach students in one class. Advisers can help students see the connections among their classes, in their majors and minors, as well as in general education requisites, and can encourage them to consider and articulate the transferable skills they are developing through their experiences in and out of the classroom.”

“Most advisers appear friendly and knowledgeable, especially in an initial advising encounter, and they consistently fulfill their responsibilities in disseminating information and maintaining relational rules. However, with large advising loads, frequent time constraints, and a typical schedule of intermittent advising sessions with the same student, they can easily overlook the conceptual aspect of advising.”

“Advisers help students to make a coherent whole out of their entire education in a manner analogous to that in which a classroom instructor helps students make sense of the material in a single course.”

The following list comprises just some of the services that academic advisers can provide in the context of an actual relationship if time is allowed to nurture one.

Developing integrity – adopting a personal set of core values and beliefs, behaving according to them, and tolerating ambiguity.

Question for Comment: What sort of advice do you wish you had gotten about education late in your high school experience or early in your college career (if you went to college)? Did you have an adviser who you actually built a relationship with?

“I am cast upon a horrible desolate Island, void of all hope of Recovery. Good. But I am alive, and not drown'd as all my Ship'd company was.”

“I had great Reason to consider it as a Determination of Heaven, that in this desolate place, and in this desolate Manner I should end my life; the tears would run plentifully down my face when I made these reflections, and sometimes I would expostulate with myself, why Providence should thus completely ruine its creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without help abandon'd, so entirely depress'd, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a life.” – Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

This has been a week of “Robinsonades” apparently. A “Robinsonade” is a story that resembles Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a story involving an abandoned or shipwrecked person who must apply their native intelligence to their desperate state and survive until Providential help comes.

On Wednesday night, I watched the film version of Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, a dystopian novel about a father and his young son trying to survive in an apocalyptic world of a dying earth and gangs of survivors who hunt and eat humans. On Friday, I finished reading The Revenant, a story based on the life of the mountain man, Hugh Glass, in which he survives a bear attack and is abandoned for dead in the wilds of the American West in 1823. Tonight, Skyler, William, and I watched The Martian, a story about the fictional character, Mark Watney, who is left for dead on Mars. I suspect that one could include the film, Gravity, in which Sandra Bullock plays astronaut, Dr. Ryan Stone, cut adrift in space - or the Tom Hanks movie, Cast Away, where Hanks’ character, Chuck Noland, is shipwrecked with only a volleyball named “Wilson” for company.

It is sort of interesting how plot lines that work can be reworked so that they work all over again. In each case, the protagonist is rendered almost helpless in the face of an unmerciful nature and insurmountable odds and yet in each case, they make due with what they have, applying their know-how to the elements available to them until they can be helped from the outside by some crucial thing that they don’t have. As Mark Watney puts it in The Martian, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the sh-- out of this.” Crusoe is provided with “his man, Friday” eventually. Hugh Glass is provided with a rattlesnake to eat, buffalo trapped in snow, a friendly Indian tribe, etc. The unnamed father in The Road finally stumbles upon a survival shelter in the yard of an abandoned home and just after he dies, his sons is “saved” from certain extinction by a family of nomads that takes him in. Ryan Stone is kept from suicide by the “mirage” of a fellow astronaut and a Chinese space station. Mark Watney combines his knowledge of botany with the detritus of the abandoned Mars base to grow potatoes and find a way to communicate with earth. Chuck Nolan uses what has washed up on the beach to make a raft. In some way, all are rewarded for their tenacious will to help themselves survive in spite of the odds.

In each case, survival demands effort and intelligence as well as some good fortune and the ability to create what is needed from things discarded. In each case, there is also an important psychological or spiritual role played by some inexplicable internal or external muse, voice, or vision. All of these stories remind me of Robert Frost’s poem, Storm Fear where the poet “counts his strength” in the face of a raging blizzard and wonders if he has the resources to meet the challenge unaided. In the end, I suppose we all need help, either internal or external and probably both. “At some point, everything's gonna go south on you,” Mark Watney tells new astronaut recruits at the end of The Martian,

“and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”

Hugh Glass, Ryan Stone, Chuck Noland, the father in The Road, and Robinson Crusoe would all agree.

Question for Comment: To what extent has your life been a “Robinsonade”?

01/23/2016

an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.

One might argue that what makes the story of Ruth, Kathy, Tommy, and their friends at Hailsham boarding school dystopian has to do with the fact that they are all clones, bred for donating organs until they “complete” [The dystopian word for “die”]. They all have first names but only initials for last names because they have no families besides each other. But really what is most dystopian about their lives is the way that they live in a symbiotic self-enforced denial with the society that they serve. Like the society that will eventually harvest their organs, they postpone thinking about the reality of what “must be” or “is” indefinitely. For Kathy and Tommy, this ability to repress extends to their affection for one another. And thus, the dystopian gloom extends to the romance contained within the story.

Sounds like a novel I should read, right?

The characters in the novel live in a world of knowing and not knowing. Awareness is always knocking but never really invited in. Here are a few passages:

“So why had we stayed silent that day? I suppose it was because even at that age–we were nine or ten–we knew just enough to make us wary of that whole territory. It's hard now to remember just how much we knew by then. We certainly knew–though not in any deep sense–that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside; we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line there were donations waiting for us. But we didn't really know what that meant. If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us. We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that. I think that's why we never asked that one further question, and why we punished Marge K. so cruelly for bringing it all up that day after the rounders match. “

Here is how their very humanity is neutered:

“But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time–like somehow we were letting the side down.”

One teacher eventually decides to step out from behind the secret that everyone knows is there. She will be fired. “The problem, as I see it,” she tells the children,

“is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I'm not. If you're going to have decent lives, then you've got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do. You're not like the actors you watch on your videos, you're not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. So you're not to talk that way any more. You'll be leaving Hailsham before long, and it's not so far off, the day you'll be preparing for your first donations. You need to remember that. If you're to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.”

Some of the children dream of someday finding the actual “models” who they are copies of. Having no knowledge of their parents leaves them having no idea who they might be. But even there, some denial seems to serve more than hinder their well-being.

“But she just carried on: “We all know it. We're modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from. We all know it, so why don't we say it? . . . If you want to look for possibles [their clone-parents], if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that's where you'll find where we all came from.”

The children of Hailsham are somewhat bred to be reality deniers. It comes naturally to them. They repress their fears, their desires, their sexuality, their longing for parents, their disappointment with their lot in life, their romantic intuitions, their very survival instincts.

That ability to know that they “belonged” with a certain person and not someone else is not something that they develop until it is much too late and it is no wonder – they never learned to know what family-belonging felt like in the first place. By the time they have a mature understanding of what the love that can form a family bond feels like, as we shall see, they have lost too many organs to live well. Yeah. It’s a sad book. It’s somewhat Hardy like in that respect. It doesn’t give the central couple a second chance after this:

“That moment when we decided to go searching for my lost tape, it was like suddenly every cloud had blown away, and we had nothing but fun and laughter before us.”

A misunderstanding drives its venomous wedge between Kathy and Tommy and they never recover from it. You can read the details here:

“I should have found something to say. I could have just denied it, though Tommy probably wouldn't have believed me. And to try to explain the thing truthfully would have been too complicated. But I could have done something. I could have challenged Ruth, told her she was twisting things, that even if I might have laughed, it wasn't in the way she was implying. I could even have gone up to Tommy and hugged him, right there in front of Ruth. That's something that came to me years later, and probably wasn't a real option at the time, given the person I was, and the way the three of us were with each other. But that might have done it, where words would only have got us in deeper.”

Many years later, Tommy and Kathy will attempt to set things aright but, it is too late for them to do so. The gods of love and St. Thomas Hardy will not allow it. Society has no tolerance for their dreams. IT too has an interest in denying realities.

Here is how it is explained to Kathy and Tommy when they try to have their “donations” postponed on account of their love for one another.

“But you must try and see it historically. After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn't time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This was what the world noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum. Yes, there were arguments. But by the time people became concerned about... about students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process.

How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn't matter. And that was how things stood until our little movement came along. But do you see what we were up against? We were virtually attempting to square the circle. Here was the world, requiring students to donate. While that remained the case, there would always be a barrier against seeing you as properly human. Well, we fought that battle for many years, and what we won for you, at least, were many improvements, though of course, you were only a select few

The world didn't want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked. They didn't want to think about you students, or about the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows. Back in the shadows where you'd been before the likes of Marie-Claude and myself ever came along. And all those influential people who'd once been so keen to help us, well of course, they all vanished.”

No one wants to know that clones have souls anymore. No one.

Question for comment: To what extent does your society teach its children to know, respect, and value their souls from a young age?Are they capable of doing those things by the time they are 16? Why or why not?

“All Wayne wanted was to have a normal family, just like everyone else. ‘Everyone else doesn't have a normal family,’ Kelly told him.”

“Kelly knew Wayne was fighting reality” the author tells us. Reality in this case is a son convinced from the earliest age that he was born a girl in a boy’s body. The central scientific argument of the book is that human beings can have male anatomies and female brains. The central social argument of the book is that they should be allowed to be what they think they are when that is the case - to make the body congruent with the mind” as Nutt puts it - if they sense themselves their sensed gender regardless of what their inherited anatomies suggest. The central psychological argument of the book is that this is not a transition of thinking that will come naturally to anyone and least of all to fathers of boys who identify as girls.

“Most people are born with the anatomy of a male also identify as a male, and most born with the anatomy of a female identify as female” the author reminds us (most of us probably knew that). “But not everyone. Some people grow up feeling like the gender opposite of the one they were born into.” “Out of the blue,” one of Wayne and Kelly’s twin sons would ask, “When do I get to be a girl?” as though he were simply encased in a caterpillar’s body waiting to turn butterfly. “I can't be myself,” Wyatt would say, “a mixture of sadness and anger in his voice. Jonas gets to wear what he wants. Why can't I?”

For Wyatt’s mother, the process of adopting her sense of what ought to be to what was is a difficult climb but something that she, with some reading and conversation, surmounts over a course of time. Perhaps it is easier to be fine with one of your children being a girl if you were one? Wayne’s process is slower.

“It was fine if the sons of other fathers were gay, because he had no problem working with gay people or his children having gay friends. He just didn't want that for his son. It would be too hard his whole life, and Wayne was afraid he wouldn't know how to be the kind of father Wyatt would want – or need.”

Wyatt’s brother, “had always seen his brother as his sister,” Nutt says, “It just took a while for everyone else.” And, as the author concludes at the end, “Wayne has had a longer journey than anyone else in the family.”

It would take time to see his child “as a girl, but not as a problem.” Becoming Nicole tries to take the reader through that generations-long process in the space of an hour or two. The author alternates between the story of the Maines family and the science, law, and psychology of the transgender experience. “Only about a quarter of those who express themselves as the opposite gender early in life still feel that way as they approach puberty,” she says, suggesting that it may not be in a child’s best interest to medically change their sex until during puberty. “But for that 25% who remain convinced they were ‘born into the wrong body,’ by that time in their development, ‘that idea of going through puberty in the wrong body is anathema to them.’”

The evil villains of the Maines family story, alas, are generally religious – Those who can “see the horizon and thus conclude that the world must be flat.” Those who, I imagine, with impeccable motives, debate just what it means when Genesis says that God made human beings “male and female” - Who cannot accept that this might have been done on the dimmer switch rather than the light switch principle. I realize that it is a stretch but, doesn’t it say that God created the day and the night? And are those not also extremes that transition back and forth on a gradient?

And even if transgendered people were not in some original design, is it not commendable to accept people as they are in this now less than perfect world? Jascha Hiefetz says that no matter which side of an argument you are on, there are people on your side that you might wish were on the other. I imagine that will be the case here as well. Regardless of how you think about this issue, and I am sure there are good people on both sides, one owes it to wisdom to read about the experiences of people like the Maines.

The philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote:

“Each of us has an original way of being human: each person has his her her own measure. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”

“Stories move the walls that need to be moved,” Nutt says in her book. This story of Wyatt (Nicole), Jonas, Wayne, and Kelly Maines as told by Amy Ellis Nutt is an attempt to use a story to help more people empathize and understand how families might be forced to create templates that are different from the ones they had in mind when they started having a family. No doubt there are many people who believe that if we keep stretching the definition of things, we will eventually have no definitions. There will be no template any more. Nothing to aim at – to protect. And the path from protecting something to being angry at those who see that protections as threatening to them is a short one.

Question for Comment: The following statement comes from the NPR web page review of this book.

“Children are never what one expects, and the trick is not to be disappointed — in fact, to be pleased — with who they are. This process of constantly recalibrating one’s expectations is the central job of parenthood: a high-wire act in which one’s own memories of childhood and the priorities and habits developed there come into direct conflict with who one’s child actually is. No one describes this tension better than Andrew Solomon in his sweeping 2012 book, “Far From the Tree,” in which he showed the tireless efforts of parents to help children who are entirely unlike them evolve into who they are. “Becoming Nicole” iterates this idea, delving deep into the case of a single family with a transgender child and discovering in its particulars certain universal truths about the ways children arrive in one’s life already themselves.

It is not often that I review Disney movies on my blog and maybe there is wisdom in that but it seemed like the subliminal messages in the film were worth noting. Monkey kingdom has all sorts of messages in it about gender, class, power, the distribution of resources, war, and family. The hero of the story is a “single mom” macaque monkey named Maya who must live on the droppings at the bottom of her social tree (literally). Everyone serves the alpha male except maybe the “three sisters” and their brats. One gets the feeling that macaque monkeys are in need of a Martin Luther Steinem to come liberate them from their Neanderthal ways. Maya’s mate gets driven off for threatening the alpha (Raja) but he comes back, leads the troop against the “crew” of macaques led by the facially deformed and warlike “Lex” and his thugs. It is interesting that Disney completely left out any notion that Lex’s gang had any single mom’s in it looking for a home of their own. Fortunately, as the story ends, with Maya and her “troop” regaining their “rightful” home, we get the impression that Maya’s new “man” will be a monogamist unlike the patriarchal Raja but … really?

Somewhere in the middle of the film, the infant monkeys are referred to “boys” and “girls” and the blatant anthropomorphism loses any hint of subtlety.

The cinematography is wonderful however. The monkeys (Lex and his lieutenants excluded) are cute as can be and the scenery is quite stunning.

Question for Comment: What do you think about the way we anthropomorphize animals in children’s movies? If that is their only exposure to animals, are they being misled – or is anthropomorphizing them the only way that they will ever get protection from us.

01/16/2016

I wish I had notes to share on this book but unfortunately, it is one that I had to listen to on my commutes to Montpelier and thus, I have only my memory to rely on. Clearly, Alan Greenspan has forgotten more things about the global economy than I will ever know in his decades of doing business in the US and 16 years as Fed chairman. The first half outlines the story of his life and how he arrived at his convictions about running an economy and each chapter subsequent addresses a central subject along the way to an understanding of the American economy. Periodically, through the mist of economic vocabulary and policy analysis, a rather distinct philosophy shines through.

Alan Greenspan, so he says, believes in the Ayn Randish idea that there is a thing called reality that can be known and that we do best when we make decisions based on that reality – unpleasant as that may be emotionally. He believes in the regulatory capabilities of free markets and the unviability of property rights and the rule of law. The best defense against cheaters is to set up systems where opposing interests oversee each other. His aim was to maintain a stable currency so that when people acted to acquire money or acted to give money away for something, they always would know what that money was worth and would be worth in the future. This confidence is essential to capitalist free markets. Though no longer based on gold reserves, he wanted the money that we use to have a gold-like certainty about it. And to a great extent, he succeeded it appears.

One also senses that Greenspan preferred a world where people got to reap what they sowed. Adjudicating consequences so that neither hard work nor irresponsibility has consequences makes it impossible to base decisions on reality. In Greenspan’s ideal world, everything but the value of the currency of exchange is allowed to change so that changes always happen for rational reasons.

Imagine for a moment that I know that money that I put in the bank right now for my retirement is going to be worth half what it is today when I take it out. How does that make my decision making uncertain? If I put in money to the Social Security system right now, and when I go to get Social security myself, it is all gone and no one contributes to it any more, how fair would that be? I get the sense that Greenspan saw his job as Fed chairman as primarily concerned with the inflation rate and the stability of the dollar but you could tell that he began seeing the need for his sort of management of the economy in other areas as well. In sifting through issues, you could almost see him discerning which things should be kept from changing so that many other things could be allowed to changerationally.

Subjects addressed in the book include Greenspan’s thoughts on capitalism, the Chinese economy, Asia, Russia, Latin America, populism, debt, globalization, wealth inequity, trade imbalances, education and the economy, global aging, corporate governance, energy, and the role of the Federal Reserve of the United States

I wish I could remember all of the different things I learned. But here are a few.

When Chinese people save money Chinese banks have to go looking for things to invest in and America has been a prime recipient of those loans. This availability of money to borrow has kept interest rates low here for a long time. If the Chinese were to start spending instead of saving, that could change.

Threats to an economy can emerge when owners do not share profits with workers but it can also be threatened when populist movements discard property rights in their quest for equal distribution of that profit. Populist movements can sometimes melt down the engine for fuel so to speak.

Central bankers are there to keep the system fair. They should not be there to make sure one side or another wins. Because political parties have an interest in pandering to constituencies, it would be a bad idea to let them control the value of dollars. This is an area where an excess of democracy could kill democracy and it is why the Fed remains independent. That independence needs to be protected by not placing a cartel of bankers and friends of bankers in positions of unelected power.

Even people trying to be objective can have a bias to their own types. Greenspan admires people who see far into the future while seeing all around the globe. He would argue that such a person is more capable of acting intelligently in their long term best interest as a class. I suspect that he was surprised to discover how bank CEOs in the 2008 crash had so egregiously used this skill of forecasting to predict that the Federal government would bail them out if they took irresponsible risks with other people’s money. I suspect that it would have surprised him to see so many powerful intelligent people risking their long-term corporate reputations for higher quarterly earnings.

According to Greenspan, there may not be any significant difference economically should a country borrow from a foreign county instead of itself if the money is used to build intelligently. Similarly, he does not really see all that much difference between having products made in other countries just as most people would not see any great harm in having the products they make made in another state. It is all free-market capitalism.

Several times, the author talks about predicting the state of Social Security in 2030. He wrote this book in 2007 the year that the very first baby boomers began to officially retire. The last baby boomers will technically be retiring in in about 2030 so that is why he selects that date. I know that Greenspan was certainly old enough to retire when he did but, it would have been a smart year for anyone looking at and managing the U.S. economy to retire. It is that point when there is a perceptible shift in the numbers of Social Security contributors and Social Security recipients. Incidentally, I turn 65 in 2027. I suspect that there will be nothing but dogfood left when I get there.

Maybe I am being pessimistic.

Question for Comment: Which of the following do you find most immediately concerning? Outsourcing, the dissolution of unions, personal debt levels, the federal deficit, the national debt, Social Security underfunding, entitlement programs, climate change natural disasters, wealth distribution inequity, inflation, stock market devaluation, rising unemployment, or wage stagnation? Could you come up with a list of things with that many things in it that would give cause for optimism?

This week, I have had a number of run-ins with the idea of redemption. New York Jets wide receiver Brandon Marshall did an interview with the Cincinnati Bengals defensive back “Pacman” Jones who, with the help of teammate, Vontaze Burfict, cost the Bengals a playoff game the other day by committing a pair of late game personal fouls. As Brandon Marshall himself has had something of a murky ethical past, the interview was a pretty raw and honest look at just who should receive mercy and who should not.

A few days ago, I stayed up late to watch the documentary, Serving Life, a double entendre that refers to the documentary’s main characters, four men with life sentences in a Louisiana State prison, each of whom has volunteered to take care of dying prison-mates in the prison hospice. Not sure why but somehow, I never really thought about all the people with life sentences who must actually die in prison each year. Murderers caring for murders. Humans caring for humans. Those who offer to provide these caring services are not told what the crimes of their respective patients were and I suspect that the patients are not told what the crimes of those caring for them are. The average sentence of all the men in this prison is ninety years. All plan to die there in some way. Some have decided that they will take whatever opportunity to serve the world the world will still give them … and for many, this is there only option. I was struck by how much we may deprive ourselves as a culture by protecting ourselves. If only there were a way to scan someone for evil intentions or for the absence of kind intentions.

I suspect that this may have been a difficult movie for the families’ of the victim’s of these men. IT must make one wonder, “How can people capable of being so selfless have been capable of being so selfish?” (One of the men had gone to jail for killing a woman he had been hired to kill by her husband. HE did not even know her.

I wonder if there has ever been a prison in all of human history where the men inside were kinder and more humane as a culture than the culture outside the prison?

Question for Comment: The Hebrew prophet Micah one asserted that the essence of the moral life was to be found in doing justly and loving mercy. It would seem that this contradiction – this wish to have mercy combined with their willingness to do justly (rather than loving justice and merely doing compassion) is what is so difficult to achieve. What Micah describes here is a state of moral cognitive dissonance where what one does and what one feels like doing are different. And yet this is considered the ideal moral state. In some ways, I wished that these men could be released after demonstrating that they were capable of compassionate living. And yet, would justice be done if that were the case? What do you think? How do you combine justice and mercy in your own life?

01/10/2016

I am not going to try to write sort of literary criticism about Zora Neale Thurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I am just going to talk about what I thought and felt as I read it. I suspect that the author would have it that way.

For those who, like me before today, have not read it, it is a story about a mulatto woman in the Deep South in the 1930’s and her journey towards self-expression and self-actualization (aided by an inheritance). Janie Crawford makes her way from being a vulnerable sizteen year old without a voice strong enough to stand up to her own grandmother - to being an independent woman able to defy all those who wish to make her an appendage of their own lives (be they, white people, male people, or the majority of her female peers). As a truly American novel, it is a story about how long it can take to write one’s own personal Declaration of Independence in a country that sees that praises independence in the abstract and suppresses it in the actual. It is a story about how entirely normal it is for many people to never achieve it and how fierce is the fight for all who would obtain it. It is a story that the novel allows Janie to tell in hindsight and as Janie herself says to her one-friend audience, Pheoby, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves,” Janie says in the novel’s thesis, echoing Jean Jaques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Holden Caulfield “They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

The source of the limitations that one has to fight and get out from under are almost incidental and in some ways, this is what makes the novel so universally appealing. It is about obtaining liberation from almost anything; from tradition, from poverty, from slavery, from sexism, from racism, from exploitation, from religious legalism, from social control, from a domineering spouse and domestic violence, from historical forces, from peer pressure, from materialism, and maybe even from an overbearing rationality. It is a book that is about how you make your way out from under the oppressive mountain of any sort of repression however it manifests itself to you in your life.

Janie Crawford’s grandmother tells us that she had a vision for her authentic life that eluded her.

“Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world.”

And thus, Janie Crawford too has a vision of what she wants her life to be as a sixteen year old girl and for the next several decades, as she tells her life story to Phoebe, she has to claw her way to get back to it – She has to overcome her grandmother, her poverty, her insecurity, her culture, her first husband, her second husband, her third husband, her peers, her racist state and country, and more than anything her own self-doubt. What Janie says of the oppression of black people by white people is something that she must learn is true of all bully-bullied relationships.

“Us talks about de white man keepin’ us down! Shucks! He don’t have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.”

That struggle for a life authentically chosen can take a lifetime. It is not the birthright of all and many go their entire lives without it. This is announced in the first paragraph of the book.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”

I find it interesting that Janie eventually winds up defending herself with the weapons and words that her oppressors taught her to use. The ability to use guns and language combined with the will and confidence to use them are eventually the skills that save her. And the guns were the easier of the two. From being almost mute in the face of her grandmother’s choice of a husband for her, she learns to use her strong voice to assert her right to live her life.

She uses words to win her case in court.

“First thing she had to remember was she was not at home. She was in the court-house fighting something and it wasn’t death. It was worse than that. It was lying thoughts.”

Janie, “full of that oldest human longing—self-revelation” uses words to resist the cumulative pressure of her black peer’s social condemnation.

“They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.”

“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding,” Hurston writes.

Faced with accusations of promiscuity, she hits back.

“De way you talkin’ you’d think de folks in dis town didn’t do nothin’ in de bed ’cept praise de Lawd.”

“If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout ’em then Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass.”

Publically criticized for running off with a near-do-well gambler named Tea Cake, she hits back.

“De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’ is just where Ah been dis year and a half y’all ain’t seen me.”

This “speaking back” in defiance is something made necessary by the constant current of messages she has received her entire life. “Honey,” she is told by her grandmother,

“de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!”

“You ain’t got no particular place,” her first husband tells her when she tries to declare some independence. “ It’s wherever Ah need yuh. Git uh move on yuh, and dat quick.”

This voice of grandmother’s despair and of “better-take-what-you-can-getism” is difficult for her to shake even when it becomes clear that staying with the old man that her grandmother has practically sold her to will kill her soul.

“Janie pulled back a long time because he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance. Still she hung back. The memory of Nanny was still powerful and strong.”

She only feels the reward of freedom when she claims it. “Morning road air was like a new dress,” Hurston says, “That made her feel the apron tied around her waist.”

Alas, she escapes the fire and lands in the frying pan. Her new man, Jody, a “whirlwind among breezes” with “uh throne in de seat of his pants” and a “bow-down command in his face” gives her more freedom than her first husband but he too sees her as an appendage to his own ego. “He didn’t mean for nobody else’s wife to rank with her,” Hurston explains, “She must look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.” He also understands the relationship between freedom of speech and freedom generally and takes what measures he can to silence her when he independent spirit emerges. “Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments,” he says when the locals compliment her way with words,

“but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home.”

This denial of a voice is what triggers her renewed resistance. “It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things” urston writes. She comes to see that there will always be someone to take you over if you hand yourself over. As with the town’s relationship to her husband, the mayor, so with her. “They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.” Her defiance emerges as his grip tightens. “Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows,” he tells her,

“I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.”

“Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!” she eventually retorts,

He counters,

“Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’s thinkin’. When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.”

“Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage,” we read,

“Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it.”

“So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired. She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him.”

“She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”

It was only a matter of time before the spark hit the tinder.

“Janie did what she had never done before, that is, thrust herself into the conversation.”

“Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business,” she insists to Jody one day,

“He told me how surprised He was ’bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ’bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”

Resistance had begun with words. It would marinate in imagination, and would soon lead to action.

“She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value.”

“For the first time she could see a man’s head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth.”

“Anybody that didn’t know would have thought that things had blown over, it looked so quiet and peaceful around. But the stillness was the sleep of swords.”

And here comes the declaration:

“You done lived wid me for twenty years and you don’t half know me atall. And you could have but you was so busy worshippin’ de works of yo’ own hands, and cuffin’ folks around in their minds till you didn’t see uh whole heap uh things yuh could have.”

“Listen, Jody, you ain’t de Jody ah run off down de road wid. You’se whut’s left after he died.”

“Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way. But you wasn’t satisfied wid me de way Ah was. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.”

And when Jody dies, she is her own person again. Only more so.

“She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair.”

“She sent her face to Joe’s funeral, and herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world.”

“Before she slept that night she burnt up every one of her head rags and went about the house next morning with her hair in one thick braid swinging well below her waist.”

Janie revisits the programming that had led her into these relationships in the first place and rejects them for insisting that she was not worthy of her dream.

“Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love.”

“Dis is uh love game,” she concludes about the essence of the good life. “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine.” Tea Cake might never make it onto her grandmothers list of approved courters, but to Janie, that no longer matters. He likes her as she is and brings out the playfulness and rebel in her.

“She couldn’t make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.”

Elvis is in the room.

Janie’s year and a half with Tea Cake is what she is being asked to explain upon returning to her former home. Tongues are wagging overtime, but Janie’s spunk in explaining her decisions to Pheoby is an inspiration and Pheoby’s response models what I suspect Hurston wants all of her readers’ responses to be.

As for me, my jury is out. I am not saying that the Tea Cake effect is not important but … Janie and Tea Cake never have children when things like responsibility and education and discipline and a job are more essential … The two of them suffer through a hurricane needlessly because Tea Cake is not the sort of person to live life with common sense. His high beams don’t ask questions more complicated than “What matters to me today?” … and in the end, the main reason that Janie does not suffer a complete life breakdown with Tea Cake’s demise has to do with the money she inherited from Husband number two. Subtract the inheritance and add a few children and gramma may have been at least a little more sensible than Hurston makes her out to be after all.

I suppose in the end, the secret to the right relationship is not to exclude common sense from your list of essential traits in a partner while not excluding all other traits besides.

Question for Comment: Are teenagers wiser than grandmothers when it comes to selecting partners? Why or why not?